occasions when we may be seduced from blame, even if we are not won
all the way to approval. Mrs. Pennell tells us in her very interesting
and very candid life of Whistler that the artist gratified a grudge
against his Venetian landlady by angling for her goldfish (placed
temptingly on a ledge beneath his window-sill); that he caught them,
fried them, and dropped them dexterously back into their bowl. It is a
highly illustrative anecdote, and we are more amused than we have any
business to be. Mr. Whistler’s method of revenge was the method of the
Irish tenants who hocked their landlord’s cattle; but the adroitness
of his malice, and the whimsical picture it presents, disarms sober
criticism. A sympathetic setting for such an episode would have been a
comedy played in the streets of Mantua, under the gay rule of Francesco
Gonzaga, and before the eyes of that fair Isabella d’Este who bore
tranquilly the misfortunes of others.
We hear so much about the sanitary qualities of laughter, we have been
taught so seriously the gospel of amusement, that any writer, preacher,
or lecturer, whose smile is broad enough to be infectious, finds
himself a prophet in the market-place. Laughter, we are told, freshens
our exhausted spirits and disposes us to good-will,--which is true.
It is also true that laughter quiets our uneasy scruples and disposes
us to simple savagery. Whatever we laugh at, we condone, and the echo
of man’s malicious merriment rings pitilessly through the centuries.
Humour which has no scorn, wit which has no sting, jests which have
no victim, these are not the pleasantries which have provoked mirth,
or fed the comic sense of a conventionalized rather than a civilized
world. “Our being,” says Montaigne, “is cemented with sickly qualities;
and whoever should divest man of the seeds of those qualities would
destroy the fundamental conditions of life.”
THE END
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE. MASSACHUSETTS
U. S. A